During his career, Louis Becke, the most internationally well-known Australian writer of the South Pacific region at the turn of the nineteenth century, wrote a series of novellas, stories, and articles that featured the infamous conman and thief, Captain William 'Bully' Hayes, with whom he had sailed through the Pacific Islands for a short period. Influenced by the work of Robert Louis Stevenson and earlier accounts of piracy in the Pacific, Becke's fictionalized version of Hayes was the

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... al archetypal South Pacific pirate character: a Long John Silver of the South Seas. Beginning with the first major work about Hayes, A Modern Buccaneer, substantially written by Becke although published under Boldrewood's name, Becke's re-imagined Hayes became the pervasive Pacific pirate literary trope not only throughout Becke's books, stories, and articles but also within the work of subsequent writers.